The EAN.UCC is the body which has for many years been the controller of the bar code standards. If you wished to use bar codes you would apply for a prefix and pay an annual subscription and an initial setup fee based on the size of you company. You would then use this prefix along with a class code to print labels for your particular products.

With the new era upon us, we have now gone towards the coding of many things, not just products. Today, numbering can rapidly identify many more objects in the supply chain. Your organisation, physical locations (such as a warehouse or loading bay), shipping containers, pallets, cases, individual items, all with discreet serial numbers. All of these objects may now be coded and with the use of networks, data about any of these items may be made available both internally and where appropriate, externally.

As an organisation, we have several General Manager Numbers (Prefixes) and are able to assign individual sequence numbers to users on either an ad hoc basis or in blocks, if sequential numbers are required. The service then maps the new number to your present id system and from then on all references to the old number are converted to the UCC.EAN number in your messages.

This allows for the use of new coding schemes without changing your existing identification systems in legacy systems. Your old system ids may also be placed as additional data in the messages, but the headers (used to locate messages on the network) will contain the new identifiers.